Stereolab - Dots And Loops

Stereolab are pretty hit and miss. With every album there comes laid back jazzy songs, epic and long post rock pieces and stupid funky jams. I chose Dots and Loops because they keep the funk to a minimum. Also because Andy Ramsay plays some rhythms that make me question the number of hands he was born with.

Brakhage starts everything off fairly low key. Ramsay plays a jazzy shuffle, sort of like an Air song, but he slips in a couple crescendo'ed snare rolls that sound beautiful. Flower Called Nowhere has a drum mix that is much dirtier and lo fi than the rest of the album, it gives his playing this cool 1930's feel to it, and splayed kick and snare patterns bring to mind old school guys like Max Roach and Tony Williams.

Most of the songs on this record are 4 - 5 minute pieces of cool rhythms, and repetitive parts that float along pretty well. Refractions in the Plastic Pulse is none of those things. This 17 minute epic is a well thought out piece that seems to travel through years of music rapidly. It starts with old school Jazz, slowly works it's way into a fusion inspired piece, then after briefly touching with New Wave it slowly dissolves into reduced bit-rate electronic music, a very "new jazz" sort of thing. It sounds like Four Tet, except it's 1997.

Ramsay is a master of playing complicated parts at a medium pace, letting their well placed hits really deliver. Prisoner of Mars and Parsec are good examples of this. This is when he is at his best, and this is when his true talent comes through.

Not when he's groovin' on some funky phat bass lines.

Audio/Visual Evidence: Miss Modular, Rainbow Conversation